Topic: Technical

Don’t wor­ry if your eyes glaze over read­ing it. My eyes glazed over writ­ing it.

Posted onOpinionated Junk

If downloading was free everyone would be doing it

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Part two in a series of two or more of top­ics rel­e­vant to the Net­work Neu­tral­i­ty debate

I’m shocked that I need to explain this, but prices are deter­mined by sup­ply, demand, and sell­ers’ deci­sions about the best ways to opti­mize sup­ply and demand. Over time they are deter­mined by noth­ing more than these.

Are there pro­duc­tion costs? Of course. But these are also gov­erned by the bal­ance of sup­ply, demand, and sell­ers’ deci­sions about the best ways to opti­mize sup­ply … Read the rest

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Posted onOpinionated Junk

«Unlimited» is fraud

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Part one in a series of two or more of top­ics rel­e­vant to the Net­work Neu­tral­i­ty debate

Imag­ine a pizze­ria. Let’s call it Mono­chro­mat­ic Piz­za because that’s a ter­ri­ble name for a piz­za joint1 and with luck I won’t anger the pro­pri­etors of any actu­al piz­za places. Let’s say Mono­chro­mat­ic Piz­za makes pret­ty good piz­za. Maybe it isn’t the best in town, but you’ve been there before and you like their pizza.

As you walk past Mono­chro­mat­ic Piz­za one nice … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

Drupal, maybe we should just be friends

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Recent­ly I fin­ished read­ing a book and went to put the book in my blog. I don’t have the book report writ­ten but want­ed to at least get a place­hold­er in the data­base with the vital sta­tis­tics: title, author, word count, my rat­ing, and so on. After enter­ing the infor­ma­tion, I hit sub­mit and was greet­ed with the less-than-use­ful mes­sage, The web­site encoun­tered an unex­pect­ed error. Please try again later.

Frankly, this sort of thing is the rea­son I don’t write. … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

No, Gmail is not HIPAA-compliant

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Google has made a big deal out of sell­ing Google Apps as a way for health-care providers to secure­ly store patients’ med­ical records. As of this writ­ing Google will sign Busi­ness Asso­ciate Agree­ments for their Google Apps for Busi­ness cus­tomers — about five dol­lars per month.

This is great. While I can’t vouch for Google’s secu­ri­ty prac­tices first­hand, I assume that they keep their net­works pret­ty well tied down. I’m not sure how appro­pri­ate Google Apps are for the pur­pos­es of … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

I blame Microsoft

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All right, it’s only sort of Microsoft­’s fault. But right now you real­ly ought to be read­ing a great arti­cle about how the Portage Coun­ty, Indi­ana Sher­if­f’s Office is a dis­grace to the law enforce­ment pro­fes­sion, and how the Dis­trict Attor­ney for that same coun­ty ought to be fired with­out delay. The arti­cle was researched and foot­not­ed. I had time­lines and even a link to con­firm that 3 April 2015 was a state hol­i­day in Indi­ana.1

It was lit­er­al­ly … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

A kilobyte of comments

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I’m not sure which fact is more hilar­i­ous (or sad): that I have a three-line func­tion with twen­ty-eight lines of com­ments, or that the func­tion exists at all.

At some point I was instruct­ed not to use pub­lic vari­ables and to cre­ate get­ters and set­ters for every­thing. Encap­su­la­tion is a good thing, but for val­ues that just need to be accessed it makes just as much sense to make the vari­able pub­lic and not waste a func­tion call to return the … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

Apple sneakily thwarts own attempt to serve users

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The head­line is mis­lead­ing, inas­much as it is dif­fi­cult to believe that this was either acci­den­tal or an attempt to serve users. «Sneak­i­ly» is sort of mis­lead­ing too. «Bril­liant­ly decep­tive» fits bet­ter. Makes for a real­ly awk­ward head­line, though.

One of the con­tentious aspects of Apple’s App Store (both the iOS and OS X fla­vors) is the lack of sup­port for appli­ca­tion upgrade paths. This has some short-term cus­tomer ben­e­fits; for exam­ple, app upgrades are usu­al­ly free. When a devel­op­er … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

SSL on a Beaglebone Black: balancing performance with security

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I’ve recent­ly set up a local serv­er on a Bea­gle­bone Black, which is a cred­it-card sized com­put­er with a 1GHz ARM Cor­tex-A8 proces­sor. I’m using it as a cloud serv­er to sync my cal­en­dar and con­tacts, hav­ing moved the own­Cloud instance (men­tioned the oth­er day) from my host­ed VPS to my local network.

I cre­at­ed a self-signed cer­tifi­cate author­i­ty and an SSL cert for the serv­er and dis­cov­ered that, con­trary to most of my expe­ri­ence run­ning … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

Owning my own data

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I final­ly got sick and tired of the sync dance with Apple and Google not want­i­ng to talk to one anoth­er. I use a Mac but I also have an iPad and since recent­ly I now have an Android phone. I had been sync­ing with iCloud and a long time ago I import­ed all my con­tacts into Google, but I haven’t had sync on that for quite a while.

After tear­ing my hair out try­ing to come up with a way … Read the rest

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